“He has told you, O man, what is good!”

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce three fundamental concepts of Jewish thought that act as the basis of society. The authors use these concepts to examine standard organisational behaviour in modern society and highlight basic shortcomings of modern organisational thought. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is a conceptual/theoretical one. Findings – The paper reveals the shortcomings of modern organisation and its members of not accepting the three fundamental concepts that underpin Jewish thought and, in turn, the unwillingness of the organisation's members to resume responsibility. Originality/value – This paper highlights three fundamental values from Jewish thought that are applicable to all, using a domain of knowledge that scholars usually use in research into management.

Fetishizing the Holocaust: comedy and transatlantic connections in Howard Jacobson's 'Kalooki Nights'

The British Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson has, from the start of his career, found himself saddled with the unenviable label of 'the English Philip Roth'. For many years, Jacobson bristled at the Roth comparisons, offering the alternative label 'the Jewish Jane Austen' and insisting that he had not read Roth at all, though more recently he has put on record his admiration for Roth's comic masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater.If Jacobson's early work was certainly imbued with a Rothian Jewish humour, its cultural reference points were almost invariably English. In contrast, Kalooki Nights is saturated with allusions to American culture, in particular Jewish American culture. This article traces some of the ways in which Kalooki Nights explores and exploits these transatlantic connections in a comic novel that both participates in and satirizes what will be called here the fetishization of the Holocaust. It is concluded that Kalooki Nights is Jacobson's audacious attempt to produce a piece of Holocaust literature that exploits the tension between the desire of some Jews of his generation to know all the 'gory details', and the necessity of recognizing that their own historical situation prevents them from ever doing so. The result is to make people laugh not at the events of the Holocaust itself but at the attempt to fetishize them.

Imagining multicultural London: containment and excess in snatch

Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000) is a comic-book gangster film that can be seen to represent the backlash against perceived notions of political correctness in what is effectively a public-schoolboy fantasy of working-class life in East London. However, the film also delineates the limits of this backlash in its depiction of minorities as either contained or excess. This is highlighted through the comic-book genre itself as well as the characterization. Thus this article explores the tension between the genre, representation and Jewish identity.

The union of securitisation and demography: immigration detention in Israel

The chapter sets its analysis of the historical and contemporary detention of asylum seekers in Israel against a wider context of that country's national immigration policy. The chapter demonstrates that Israel perceives asylum seekers as a threat to its self-defined Jewish character. Its twofold conclusion argues that the government therefore subjects asylum seekers to harsh detention practices that afford detainees limited procedural guarantees, and that these procedures cut against the justification for detention as a measure to facilitate deportation.

Papal power and protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth-century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.